Reporting back on Cake

For anyone who was unable to attend the Liberal Democrat Friends of Cake Annual General Meeting last weekend, here are the notes the Underbaker circulated on Facebook a couple of days ago:


CONFERENCE POLICY IN FULL: at our AGM in Brighton, the following composited motion was passed reflecting the current values and direction of the party, including the proposed "friends of friends of someone who once met a Lib Dem at a train station and she seemed fairly nice" system of selecting party leader.

This AGM Notes:a) CAKE;
b) biscuits;
c) tarts;
d) pies and what have been termed "other sundry Liberal Carbohydrate groupings" by writers for the website Liberal Cakeocrat Voice;
e) that these now form the so-called "broad church" of Liberalism, despite many of them (and we mean the biscuits) coming from separate and fundamentally illiberal ideological traditions.

This AGM is Proud of our Record:
a) That the Old Age Pension was devised by the Liberal MP and part-time Prime Minister David Lloyd George after young Megan pressed him to ensure that our nation's elderly would be able to afford a nice bit of cake now and then.
b) That the NHS was invented by the Liberal MP William Beveridge to assist anyone who needed help in having their cake and eating it.

This AGM Believes:
a) In licking your finger and using it to pick the last crumbs up off the plate when no-one's looking, as first publicly proposed by John Stuart Mill to be the logical conclusion of Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism.
b) But that it was most likely Harriet Taylor's idea as she was a very sensible woman.

This AGM Recognises:
a) The fine tradition of Moist Liberalism on which this Party was built.
b) Our traditional membership system, which consists of sending a cake not less than six inches in diameter to the Treasurer annually, who brings any leftovers to executive meetings for the rest of the team to polish off.

This AGM is Deeply Troubled by:
a) The entryist Biscuitty Tendency, who have sought to annex the Jaffa Cake and redefine Liberalism from its Moist roots, and the implications this has for what will be on the menu at Betty's Tea Rooms at York Spring Conference.
b) The status of Brussels And European Friends Of French Fancies And Danish Pastries in a post-Brexit world, and whether it will still be entitled to send voting representatives to Federal Conference.
c) The Party Leadership's suggestion of a "friends of neighbours of close personal acquaintances of Friends Of Cake" supporter scheme, under which eating a cake without first offering the Executive a slice would still count as showing somehow adequate commitment to the cause, which to us is frankly about as convincing as the adding up in a Labservative Party manifesto, I mean CRUMBS.

This AGM resolves:
a) To put the kettle on and have a worry about it all over a cuppa and a lovely bit of velvet cake at the first opportunity.

Interview-ette for Foundation

A little piece Foundation did with me about BiPhoria and Bi Visibility Day 2018...

How can people get involved with your services?

BiPhoria does lots of things all through the year – social spaces, sending speakers to events, running bi outreach and visibility stalls.  The best place to start is at our monthly “talky space” meetings which are at LGBT Foundation on the first Tuesday of each month at 7.30pm – so the next one is on Tuesday 2^nd October. Or drop us a line on bis@biphoria.org.uk

What events are you holding this year for Bi visibility day?

By the time people read this we’ll have unveiled our bi visibility banner on Canal Street – on Sackville Gardens roughly opposite Via.  Go take a look! 

On Saturday 22nd we’ll be at LGBT Foundation from 12.30 having a chatter and making #StillBisexual videos – bring along your bi story to share! 

On the day itself – Sunday 23rd – we will be in Bolton running a street stall as part of Bolton Pride, and joining Salford Uni as part of their freshers week student programme.  And we’ll be all over social media about the date alongside the @bivisibilityday team.

What are your hopes for the day?

It’s the twentieth year and we’ve seen so much change in that time, including many more organisations and institutions marking the date as a part of bi inclusion and challenging biphobia – back in 1999 it was just BiPhoria! 

I hope the attendant publicity and things like the bi flags flying and Canal Street banner will prompt conversations that help bi people feel more able to be open about who they are and find one another, because invisibility and the resulting sense of isolation is one of our greatest challenges.

And that we remember our comparative visibility now is built on the work of generations of bi and LGBT+ activists who worked when things were so much more difficult.

The LGBTphobic Tory 'stalking horse'

With the party conferences season in full swing there is open plotting and rebellion in both the Conservative and Labour parties. Today an implausible MP has broken cover as a potential "stalking horse" on the Tory benches, offering to run against Theresa May for the party leadership should his colleagues back him.

George Freeman, a venture capitalist who became an MP in 2010, was a trenchant opponent of same-sex marriage. His opposition extended not just to opposing the right to marry but also that the Treasury should cover the minor costs of the legislative changeover.

Of course, research has confirmed in recent years what we knew all along - that discriminatory marriage laws have a huge impact on young LGBT people growing up.

So while his record signals George to be a supporter of higher rates of teen suicide and self harm we should remember that Theresa was a late convert - championing similar causes through laws like Section 28 up until the formation of the 2010 coalition government, when as Home Secretary she was persuaded of the case for same-sex marriage by junior minister Lynne Featherstone.

We can only hope that, if George's career suddenly acquires some momentum, there is a similar voice nearby to drag him towards the 21st century too.

Anti-fascist surge in Sweden

The clickbait media narrative is all to predictable in this weekend's Swedish elections.

The fascists are up, and that it is by less than presaged doesn't matter: they "won the election" declares the internets. Funnily all those times I watched the Liberals come third in votes and seats here they never said that. 1997 wasn't "Ashdown sweeps to power", Roy Jenkins wasn't hailed the victor in '83. Clegg swept up 24% of the vote in 2010 and was declared a busted flush.

But no, from the same journalists as cheerled the BNP to their Euro-seats it's they have "doubled their vote at every election". Which is sad news, naturally, but also says they have started to stall and hit a glass ceiling as their vote rose by half rather than 100% this time around.

But while the fascists did well, you can't helpe but notice that there were almost the same number of seat gains for their diametric opposites.

It's the wishy-washy parties, the Swedish counterparts of our inbetweeny Jeremites, Lucaseenies and Maybottles, who lost ground.

Changing Trains

Few coherent people entirely support the policies of just one political party and one of the Labour policies I warm to is the proposal to renationalise the railways.

Despite being old enough to remember how much worse they were before privatisation than they are now, the idea has deep emotional appeal.

Trains really don't make sense in a privatised-for-competition kind of a way: just like the water and sewage companies, it's all a bit peculiar.

Buses work out badly under competition but you can at least conceive that on the profitable routes at the busy time of day three or four operators can whisk a bus along a bit of road and compete on frequency, price or the like.

But trains can't so easily weave around one another. On the odd route where they can compete, the demand that you buy tickets before travel and while trying to crane your neck round to look at a departure board on the other side of the station from the ticket office to check whether you want this ticket or that ticket if you are to be able to board a timely train. But for most of us, rail competition is a work of fiction, as we have a monopolistic supplier for whatever commute or common trundle up the line to the big town we most often make.

But this is a bit of a heart versus head kind of a subject. And the more I think about it, the more I struggle with two things about renationalisation, even ignoring the potential impact on private pension provision and the like.

First - that I think most people cheering on the idea of rail nationalisation believe it will put an end to the ridiculous fares we pay in the UK.  "The rail companies make millions off of us!" goes the cry. 

The trouble is that's millions in profit from billions in turnover: take the profit out of the system and you free about 2% of the money involved.  With annual fare rises officially of the order of 3%-4% and actual fare rises* locally ranging between 10% and an outrageous 45% in recent years, 2% is not a lot to take out of the system. It's not even one year's worth of fare rises.

A fare freeze for a year and you've taken all the profit out of the system.  I think when the fare rises then go back to their usual painful pattern there would be a lot of public disappointment.

The second problem is taking rail investment into the hands of the government. There are two parties who mostly take turns having power in the UK - and to be blunt, one of them is about twice as effective at winning elections as the other.

Thinking about the agendas of recent Chancellors, do we want to go from the ongoing programme of new rolling stock being added to the network in the past twenty years to a situation where two years out of three there would be scant investment because public spending is "bad" and the rail unions bankroll the 'wrong' party?





* How do they keep getting away with this lie by the way? They claim 3% or the like in the headline figures but then every damn ticket gets rounded up by another 9p.

Change for the better?

The Beeb have announced changes to political programming on TV. I wonder if they will be for the better?

Certainly, UK television needs better political reporting. Like our newspapers, even the bits that like to think of themselves as responsible grown-up reporting are frustratingly lazy and present a narrative that has its flaws and its sparkle but is crucially devoid of attention span. 

On the left, think back to when Clegg became the leader of the Liberals in 2007 and he announced his aim was to double the number of seats the party had. Never mind what became of that for now: nowhere was there any analysis of what that would actually mean for the party and for politics. A simple grasp of maths tells you that Liberal force with a quarter of the seats in the Commons rather than an eighth would have meant a hung parliament or one of the Establishment parties being deposed from their cosy duopoly. Exploration of what that might mean prior to May 2010: nil.

Moving our lens to the right, at the start of this decade when Ed Miliband became Labour leader and sought to capitalise on the wave of unpopularity of the increase in student tuition fees from £3500 to £6000-9000, the BBC lacked even enough attention span to challenge this with the fact that a few months earlier he had stood on a manifesto that promised to raise them to £15,000 a year and beyond.

And continuing on our rightward trajectory, the BNP were cheerled to popularity by a media that thought they were exciting, newsy and edgy and was happy to help them to a brace of MEPs, and that for UKIP did the same in spades. Society paid and will continue to pay a price for those things, but not the people who enabled it.

I am perhaps kidding myself but the rose-tinted memories of Brian Walden's forensic interview approach on Weekend World in the 80s would surely have had the kind of background reading done thoroughly that seems to be missing now.

It's not just a problem at the BBC, as we saw last year when Channel 4's homophobic news anchor was left to run riot despite the station's pretensions to liberal values. And as for Sky Fox News...

The Beeb are determined to cut expenditure. That's going to happen through cutting broadcast hours. Surely better to save through getting rid of the deadwood presenters. The airtime is all there in the digitally multiplexed broadcast world, after all.

A press release from Auntie promising a shift to a more "conversational, unstuffy approach" that has less screen time and drops the party conference season from the roster doesn't sound like one that will lead to the kind of paying attention we need from our political reportage class.  If anything the reverse. Go on, Beeb, prove me wrong.

Rid of it

It's an emotionally resonant date to mark but I probably can't improve on my summary of the Section 28 affair from two years ago here. But as we mark 30 years since Section 28 came in, worth remembering that it is also 15 and 18 years since it was got rid of, depending where you live. Yet its shadow lingered on - and as the current government drags its heels on reform of sex and relationship education for England that shadow gets to linger a little longer. And we have this bold parallel taking place around us as voices just like those that warned of the danger of allowing children to know that bi and gay people existed then, now warning of the horrors that will be unleashed if children get to know about gender diversity. I might just live long enough to see what the next stupid scare story is in thirty more years.

It was heartwarming to see the news from Wales yesterday where the Lib Dem / Labour coalition is striking out in the opposite direction from Section 28, giving young people age-appropriate information to give them information and skills around gender, sexuality, consent and bodily autonomy. I grew up in Wales at the height of clause mania and it is nigh impossible to imagine such things. Yet here we are: hurrah.

For Scotland, the clause went three years before the rest of the UK, reflecting how the Lib Dem / Labour coalition government there had different priorities from the Labour majority government at Westminster. One of the frustrations of the 2010-2015 Lib Dem / Tory coalition was that it was almost always critiqued against what had been before, rather than what would have happened had the Brown government won another term. That's a misleading prism to look at things through - a logic that would wind up with asking why the 1974 Labour government did so little to roll out broadband internet access to rural areas - but with the SNP running Scotland and Labour running Wales there was no easy and direct comparison. But with tuition fees, the evil clause and a smattering of other things, from 1999 we got a clear reflection of exactly what difference the Liberals were making compared to having a single party administration.

For the rest of us it took another three years, and I'd forgotten that when it was at last brought to an end by an amendment tabled by Ed Davey - one of those Liberal MPs who lost their seat in the big lurch right of 2015 but who is now back in parliament. There's a neat symmetry that both sides of the border it was kicked out by Liberals, as the only party to have opposed it in those early days of 87/88.

Bi Erasure at the Beeb

Sadly little surprise that the BBC politics team is erasing bisexuality again.

It's over a decade since they were taken to task over reporting about another prominent left-wing bisexual MP, Simon Hughes, as John Pienaar declared that someone who had talked about having relationships with men and women was therefore gay. 

Expect a lot more of this as a retelling of the Thorpe saga is heading for TV screens (carefully timed, you note, for publicity just ahead of a round of elections).

There is a simple yet remarkable story that his career was ended by the demands of his ex, which spiralled out of control winding up with the bizarre dog shooting incident. Or there are the takes on it which reflect on how he was seen as a growing threat to the establishment in the UK and to the South African apartheid regime. Choose the level of conspiracy that suits your tastes.

Thorpe was - insofar as one can tell from much distance in time and social strata - a bisexual man whose life was shaped in an era where that had lots of social and legal implications. Like Nigel Farage, a great self-publicist, though with diametrically opposite views.

But as he seems to have had long happy relationships with women, erasing many years of marriage and other relationships away on a "just one man makes you completely gay" basis is below the standards of reporting we should expect from Auntie.

The "bi" part of the word bisexual gets falsely accused of meaning "2" from some quarters, but there are sadly still BBC journalists not capable of counting even that high.


(Not unique to the BBC, of course. Here in the Times for instance.)